Ask Steph

Recently I did a round of visits to some clients North East of Melbourne's CBD.  While waiting in reception at the third company that I visited , I took out my iPhone, and proceeded to share up to the business Facebook page a photograph that I had taken earlier that morning at the first client I had visited.  Now, most of my clients are printers, and they almost all invariably have an old Heidelberg, or some other older antique piece of print history somewhere onsite.  The picture I had taken was of a really old original printers tray displayed in the reception area. It's not something you see very often. It was (at least to me anyway) a beautiful piece of history.  While I was  typing in the text and comments to go with the picture, waiting in reception at client number 3, they came out to meet me and saw me on the phone.  My client started laughing and said something about not playing on phones, and being present in the real world. To which I replied with...

I was accused of  'hiding behind my ivory tower' by a client in South Africa recently. I imagine my ivory tower would look like this, although in my head it looks better. Clearly Graphic Design isn't for me That's a first. Also, if I did have an Ivory Tower, it certainly wouldn't be big enough for me to hide behind, given my modest lifestyle. I am by no means wealthy, only barely reaching the edges of middle class really. (And yes, I know how that sounds given the extreme poverty in my country of birth and other places around the world.) Here's what I think of this Ivory Tower I am hiding behind. I work 7 days a week;  full days that start around 5 am and end anywhere between 7 and 9 pm. There is some flexbility around that, usually I average 12 hours a day at our busy times, and 9 or so if it's dead quiet.

So I noticed somewhere around March or April that I've been endorsed for some of my skills- and I'm very grateful to the new contacts and ex-colleagues and friends who have taken the time to endorse me. I've also noticed - and I shall keep names out of it - that some of my skills ( which I do have) have been endorsed by people that could not possibly have experienced or witnessed those skills. Because  I know them in a completely different sphere than the skills they have now endorsed. For example. I know some SQL . I know it because I learnt it by working on an Oracle database while being a Business Analyst at Discovery Health . Unless you have worked with me at Discovery ( and even then , I did a lot of different things at Discovery Health) you wouldn't really be able to endorse my SQL skills. I also know a fair bit about databases and database management. Not all of it by direct experience mind you, but because in working with DBA's over the years I have pi...

So sometimes I am just blown away by random statistics. And sometimes , I am just blown away by the seemingly random, but actually good to know little factoids that feature in my line of work. Like the fact that there are just on 23 million small businesses in America 1 -  a small business being one that employs between 0 and 20 people. I would assume 0 means it's just the owner by his lonesome doing the work, otherwise, is Casper helping out ? This number blows my mind because I currently live in a country with a total population not far off that number. In fact the statisticians officially predicted we'd be over the 23 million mark at 9:57 pm last night . or so I am told by the news media. And I come from a country ( South Africa) with a population just shy of double that amount - South Africa was at 51 million people as at the 2011 census. Where 12 million people in total live in Gauteng, which is the financial hub and powerhouse of the country. And here's Am...